NEXT

Toronto’s condominium boom is the local echo of a surge of new housing construction sweeping cities throughout the world. And the opportunities for making money in this thriving global marketplace have not been lost on Toronto designers.

In recent years, several local architectural firms have struck out beyond the local turf and crafted residential structures for cities beyond Canada. The worldwide work of these architects deserves to be better known, because it shows how our hometown teams are playing the architectural game in very different ballparks.

Take architectsAlliance. For anyone following Toronto’s condo market, this firm needs no elaborate introduction. It has emerged as a prolific supplier of high-quality designs for downtown residential towers. More are on the way: the Clear Spirit condo stack in the Distillery District, for instance, and X on Jarvis Street, the company’s most forthright homage so far to the elegant modernism of German-American master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

But in a high-rise project now under way in the Netherlands, Adrian di Castri and Peter Clewes, architectsAlliance’s lead designers, are bidding farewell (for the moment) to the modernist box, and employing an expressive design vocabulary that’s more appropriate to the work’s urban site.

The $100-million complex, called Waalpanorama, will rise on the edge of Nijmegen, a university town about 100 kilometres inland from Rotterdam along the Waal River. In addition to a 40-storey tower of market-priced condominiums, the scheme will include a landscaped, green-roofed public parking garage for 900 cars, social housing, lounges for residents and retail at grade.

The initial contact of architectsAlliance with its future clients came during a swing through Canada by a group of Dutch tall-building enthusiasts that included architects, planners, developers and city officials. “Residential buildings in Holland are quite opaque relative to what’s been happening in Toronto in the last 15 years,” Mr. di Castri told me. “They were blown away by our completely glassy apartments. They thought it would be tremendous to bring that home.”

So it happened that the development arm of the Dutch national railway, which owns the narrow, track-side Waalpanorama site, asked Mr. di Castri and Mr. Clewes to propose a tall building in a contemporary idiom, but also something that would make an attractive fit with the steeple of medieval St. Steven’s Cathedral now dominating the skyline. The current plan for the tower, which the client has welcomed, calls for a romantically undulating skin of continuous glass-fronted balconies and a high-performance glass curtain wall, all of it gently twisting into the sky.

But what’s the appeal of building tall in the low-rise Netherlands? “One of the things that’s happened in Holland over the last few years is a huge expansion of the suburbs,” Mr. di Castri said. “They are very well planned, and they are much more sophisticated than our suburbs, but they are tremendously land consumptive. And concern with global warming means that much land reclaimed from the sea is going to be returned to wetlands, putting pressure on the remaining land. There is much interest in intensification.”

For architectsAlliance, the Dutch project is an adventure in design. As Mr. di Castri put it, “There’s more than one way you can skin a cat. We are concerned with not becoming stale, and we are interested in expanding our repertoire. The client was concerned about the orientation of an orthogonal tower. So we went through a series of variations and decided to make it non-directional. The ideal form would be a cylinder. But cylinders are quite unwieldy, and they end up looking very fat. So we made it a freer, looser form – a cool shape in terms of sculptural effect and the way light will hit it.”

But along with giving architectsAlliance scope to develop new design ideas, the Dutch experience has also driven home the difference between Holland and here.

“In many ways it’s better,” Mr. di Castri said. “To be asked to develop a rationale for the existence of the project, and then have the city receive it with tremendous enthusiasm, even asking you to push it a little bit further—it’s inconceivable in Toronto.

“You have respect and authority that’s unheard-of in North America. Here, it’s very restrictive; any response from the city is timorous, there’s tremendous fear of anything new or different, anything that takes a strong position. All these things are looked at fearfully, but in Holland, they are looked at as the mandate of architecture. Design is written into the Dutch constitution, so there’s a difference right there.